The scrutiny Khelif and Lin face over their sex at the Olympics is a repeating problem in sports

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It’s 15 years ago this month that a teenage runner from South Africa was publicly scrutinized over her sex at a major sports event. The lesson everyone was meant to take from that was: never again.

Yet, the humiliation Caster Semenya faced has been repeated for two women competing in boxing at the Paris Olympics, exposing more female athletes to hurtful remarks and online abuse in a contentious divide over sex, gender and identity in sports.

While Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan could be basking in the pride of winning fights for their countries, they are instead having their sex questioned in front of the world after the Olympics-banned boxing federation claimed they failed sex verification tests last year but has given little information about them.

Olympic officials have called the arbitrary testing “so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it” and stressed that both boxers were assigned female at birth, identify as women and are eligible to compete in women’s competitions. The two have still been bombarded with hateful remarks, sometimes from prominent people outside of the sports world.

“This has effects, massive effects,” Khelif said in Arabic in a recent interview with SNTV, a sports partner of The Associated Press. “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people.”

Their stories bear many resemblances to that of Semenya, the runner whose arrival in elite track and field at the 2009 world championships forced the sports world to confront an issue that is highly complex and also still largely characterized by the same misconceptions as back then.

Semenya was just 18 when she was thrust